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Sina Weibo, the micro-blogging platform that took root among China’s white-collar class, may be worth more than $3 billion today after Alibaba agreed to pay $586 million to buy preferred and ordinary shares in the company.

The two companies say the deal happened so that both companies could better connect Alibaba merchants to their Weibo users and followers and experiment with new ideas in social commerce. The partnership could bring $380 million in advertising and e-commerce revenues to Weibo over the next three years, Sina said. Alibaba also reserves the right to bump its ownership up to 30 percent.

It’s interesting because no such equivalent partnership exists in Western markets. E-commerce companies like eBay and Amazon have basic Facebook integrations but no deep strategic investments.